Wiring and the catalog

PATCH's catalog holds all 45 modules. This page is about adding a module to a patch, rewiring it with cables, and reading what the model makes of each module.

Add a module

1. Press ADD MODULE in PATCH's head (or /). The catalog opens over the well's left.
2. Click a module. It is now in your hand, and the line along the well's top names it, with its price and ▶.
3. Every socket it can go into lights up and says what will happen there: green inserts it after what’s in the socket, and amber replaces it. Point at one and the module is drawn, gray and dashed, where it would go: on the cable when there is room, otherwise just above or below the modules it would cover, with a dashed lead to its place (a source is drawn over the module it replaces).
4. Click a lit ○ to place it. Esc, or ✕ on that line, puts it down.

The line stays one line. Beside the open catalog its price is the figure alone (+0.08 ± 0.18, or a guess and its figure; what it prices, and that it is the same at every socket, is its tooltip), and what happens at the socket and the preview's words are cut short before the price or ▶ are; in a narrow window the preview's trace and the count of lit sockets step out.

To hear a placement before you make it, rest the pointer on a lit ○ for a moment, or press ▶ on the line along the well's top. It renders two seconds of the patch with the module in it, shows them in that line's scope, and places nothing. Once the pointer leaves the socket, the line names the one it means (hear it after the filter) and that socket is ringed, so ▶ plays what the line shows.

Every placement is one undo step, and its toast offers TAKE IT OUT. Dragging a module from the catalog onto a socket works too, and a missed drop says so. The catalog closes with ✕ or Esc (after a module in hand is put down).

From the keyboard

The catalog

The catalog, headed ADD A MODULE, holds 45 modules in ten groups, in the order a signal meets them:

• the sound: SOURCES, SHAPE, FILTER, SPACE, MOTION, DYNAMICS, and COMBINE;
• then the modulators: MODULATION, SHAPE CV (what bends a modulator), and COMBINE CV (two modulators, one cable).

So “what goes after a filter” is a question the order answers.

Above the groups, SET ASIDE lists what you have set aside (to drag back onto a socket), and IN THIS PATCH the modules the patch is made of. Click one to jump to it in the rack.

Each module shows three things at rest:

• a glyph for what it does to a wave;
• the name a synthesist would use;
• its ports: what it takes, and what it gives.

Under the model view (hold ⌥), a fourth: a bar with a whisker, which way your taste leans on this kind of module, and how sure the model is. The model's guess for the next module has an amber dot beside its name.

The bar appears only once the model has been fitted and at least five sounds in the pool use the module or another of its family (a filter, an EQ, and a vocoder are one family to the model); until then it’s a dash. It is solid when the whisker clears zero, and hollow while it crosses it (still a guess), as LEARNING’s weights draw it. “The model barely leans on this” and “the model has never seen this” are different statements, and they don’t look alike.

Searching it

Press / to search. It finds a module by sound as well as by name: grit finds distortion and bitcrush, wander finds sample-and-hold random, and vowel finds the formant oscillator. A search for something Auracle doesn’t have says so, and says why.

The spec card

Point at a module and its description opens over the well's bottom edge, from the readout at its foot; focus it from the keyboard and a card opens beside the catalog:

1. One sentence on what it does to a sound.
2. Its ports.
3. The settings it arrives with.
4. What the model makes of it, under the model view only (hold ⌥, or press model), in one of five states, from Not a coordinate the taste model measures on its own. to you lean toward it. Reading what it learned quotes all five.
5. heard: what the model can and can’t hear of this module. The chorus card says the model hears it as comb filtering, not as width: the model hears left and right summed, so it learns the artifact rather than the effect.

That last line tells you when a taste of yours is real but out of the model’s hearing. Then starring sounds that use the module won’t teach the model what you mean.

Dragging cables

1. Drag from an out jack.
2. Every input it can go into lights up. The module’s own chain is left out, so you can’t make a loop.
3. Drop it on a lit jack. It snaps within a short distance.

Dropping into empty space opens the catalog with that socket already chosen, and a drop that can’t work says why. Clicking the source and then the target works too.

Drop an output onto a socket that already has something in it, and a small menu asks which you mean:

• move it here: the module leaves its old socket (which becomes empty), and what was here is set aside;
• branch here: a copy joins what is here through a mix, and nothing moves. It’s a copy because one output can’t feed two places.

Modulation chains

A modulation input takes a chain, not only one modulator: s&h rand → quantize → slew before it ever reaches a cutoff. The rack draws the whole chain in amber.

• Drop a SHAPE CV module (quantize, slew, rectify, hold) on a cable that already carries a modulator, and it takes that modulator as its input instead of replacing it.
• COMBINE CV takes two modulators and gives back one.
• The socket says which of fill, replace, or shape it’s about to do.
• How deep a modulation can go is bounded, so it can’t be wired to swamp its destination.

Nearly every module has a modulation input with a named destination. Among the sources, vco and supersaw take it as pitch, wavetable as morph, pluck as decay, and formant as vowel. The ones with nowhere sensible to send it go without: noise, whose only setting is a color switch, and mix and ring mod, whose two inputs are both audio.

The step sequencer

steps is the one modulator you draw rather than dial. Under its three knobs (rate, length, and glide) sits a row of eight bars, one per step.

1. Press a bar and drag up or down to set that step, or focus it and use ↑ and ↓ like any other knob.
2. Cable it to a cutoff, a wavefolder, or a wavetable’s morph, and the timbre plays a rhythm of its own.
3. Turn glide up to slide each step into the next; at zero the steps are hard.

The line through the middle is no push: a bar above it pushes the destination up, and a bar below pushes it down. length sets how many of the eight bars play. The ones past it are grayed but kept, and lengthening the pattern brings them back.

Breeding treats every bar as its own knob, so it can change one step without touching the others. Press L on a focused bar to lock that step while the rest evolve.

Two-input modules

Six modules take two inputs, and the difference matters when you wire them:

In the second group the second input is a control signal, not audio, and the rack won’t let you wire it as audio.

SET ASIDE

Anything you unplug, delete, or bypass is set aside, and stays across a reload. SET ASIDE n at the well's foot counts it and opens the shelf; the catalog lists it first too.

1. Drag a wired in jack off its socket to unplug it. The chain is set aside, and the socket it left is empty and silent.
2. Drag its ● back from the shelf (or the catalog) onto a lit ○ to put it in. ✕ discards it.

Which of the catalog's groups are open persists; the catalog itself opens when you ask for it.

What to try next

• Search the catalog for grit, and try each module it finds on the same sound.
• Drop a SHAPE CV module on an amber cable, and hear the modulation change shape.
• Reading what it learned: what the bars in the catalog can and can’t tell you.